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The Causal Role of Right Frontopolar Cortex in Moral Judgment, Negative Emotion Induction, and Executive Control

INTRODUCTION: Converging evidence suggests that both emotional and cognitive processes are critically involved in moral judgment, and may be mediated by discrete parts of the prefrontal cortex. The current study aimed at investigating the mediatory effect of right Frontopolar Cortex (rFPC) on the wa...

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Autores principales: Ziaei, Maryam, Togha, Mansoureh, Rahimian, Elham, Persson, Jonas
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Iranian Neuroscience Society 2019
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6484187/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31031892
http://dx.doi.org/10.32598/bcn.9.10.225
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author Ziaei, Maryam
Togha, Mansoureh
Rahimian, Elham
Persson, Jonas
author_facet Ziaei, Maryam
Togha, Mansoureh
Rahimian, Elham
Persson, Jonas
author_sort Ziaei, Maryam
collection PubMed
description INTRODUCTION: Converging evidence suggests that both emotional and cognitive processes are critically involved in moral judgment, and may be mediated by discrete parts of the prefrontal cortex. The current study aimed at investigating the mediatory effect of right Frontopolar Cortex (rFPC) on the way that emotions affect moral judgments. METHODS: Six adult patients affected by rFPC and 10 healthy controls were included in the study. Participants made judgements on moral dilemmas after being shown either neutral or emotional pictures. The role of rFPC in executive control and emotional experience was also examined. RESULTS: The study results showed that inducing an emotional state increased the number of utilitarian responses both in the patients and controls. However, no significant differences were observed between the patients and controls in response time or the number of utilitarian responses. Also, no significant differences were observed in personal and impersonal dilemmas before and after the emotion induction in intergroup comparisons. Results of the executive control tasks showed reduced performance in patients affected by rFPC compared with the controls. CONCLUSION: The results of the current study suggested that rFPC might not have a direct role in mediating emotional processes during moral judgments, but possibly this region is important in a network supporting executive control functions.
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spelling pubmed-64841872019-04-26 The Causal Role of Right Frontopolar Cortex in Moral Judgment, Negative Emotion Induction, and Executive Control Ziaei, Maryam Togha, Mansoureh Rahimian, Elham Persson, Jonas Basic Clin Neurosci Research Paper INTRODUCTION: Converging evidence suggests that both emotional and cognitive processes are critically involved in moral judgment, and may be mediated by discrete parts of the prefrontal cortex. The current study aimed at investigating the mediatory effect of right Frontopolar Cortex (rFPC) on the way that emotions affect moral judgments. METHODS: Six adult patients affected by rFPC and 10 healthy controls were included in the study. Participants made judgements on moral dilemmas after being shown either neutral or emotional pictures. The role of rFPC in executive control and emotional experience was also examined. RESULTS: The study results showed that inducing an emotional state increased the number of utilitarian responses both in the patients and controls. However, no significant differences were observed between the patients and controls in response time or the number of utilitarian responses. Also, no significant differences were observed in personal and impersonal dilemmas before and after the emotion induction in intergroup comparisons. Results of the executive control tasks showed reduced performance in patients affected by rFPC compared with the controls. CONCLUSION: The results of the current study suggested that rFPC might not have a direct role in mediating emotional processes during moral judgments, but possibly this region is important in a network supporting executive control functions. Iranian Neuroscience Society 2019 2019-01-01 /pmc/articles/PMC6484187/ /pubmed/31031892 http://dx.doi.org/10.32598/bcn.9.10.225 Text en Copyright© 2019 Iranian Neuroscience Society http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
spellingShingle Research Paper
Ziaei, Maryam
Togha, Mansoureh
Rahimian, Elham
Persson, Jonas
The Causal Role of Right Frontopolar Cortex in Moral Judgment, Negative Emotion Induction, and Executive Control
title The Causal Role of Right Frontopolar Cortex in Moral Judgment, Negative Emotion Induction, and Executive Control
title_full The Causal Role of Right Frontopolar Cortex in Moral Judgment, Negative Emotion Induction, and Executive Control
title_fullStr The Causal Role of Right Frontopolar Cortex in Moral Judgment, Negative Emotion Induction, and Executive Control
title_full_unstemmed The Causal Role of Right Frontopolar Cortex in Moral Judgment, Negative Emotion Induction, and Executive Control
title_short The Causal Role of Right Frontopolar Cortex in Moral Judgment, Negative Emotion Induction, and Executive Control
title_sort causal role of right frontopolar cortex in moral judgment, negative emotion induction, and executive control
topic Research Paper
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6484187/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31031892
http://dx.doi.org/10.32598/bcn.9.10.225
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